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Used responsibly and cautiously, bulk e-mail can be a powerful addition to your marketing arsenal

AS A COLLEGE SOPHOMORE, CHRIS PIRILLO OF Des Moines surfed the Web looking for cool Windows-related sites, sharing his finds with family via e-mail. As word spread that Pirillo was a resource, the care and feeding of his e-mail list grew into a full-time job.

Today, Pirillo’s free Windows newsletter, “Lockergnome,” goes out to more than 170,000 readers daily, and he’s written a book called Poor Richard’s E-Mail Publishing: Newsletters, Bulletins, Discussion Groups and Other Powerful Communications Tools (Top Floor Publishing).

“Everybody’s got a Web site,” Pirillo says, “but unless [yours is] collecting visitors’ names and e-mail addresses, you’re missing a great opportunity to e-mail news and reminders that keep your business in people’s minds. As long as you have quality content–something worth reading–people will be glad to see your message.”

If you are a computer savvy, you can perform a RAID 5 repair all by yourself. It is not difficult to fix this kind of computer concern as long as you are guided appropriately. However, you have to take note that when you start to repair a Dell PowerEdge RAID 5, you should be certain about what you are doing. Once you get into the guts of a Dell server, there is no turning back. So if you are not confident about it, look here for hard drive crash tips.

EVERYONE KNOWS A MESSY WORKSPACE is a nagging distraction; but what about a chaotic computer desktop? Or an e-mail inbox jammed with 5,000 messages? “You don’t see the clutter, so it just builds and builds,” says Ken Diebold, president of the Long Island, N.Y., Corporate Learning Group, which helps clients organize both paper and electronic files. And the trouble this mess causes is not just cosmetic: A glut of files, folders, and applications can slow your system and waste your precious time by making it difficult to find anything when you need it.

If you’re an electronic pack rat, the good news is that you can create work-friendly order from unruly overflow. Follow this three-week plan to find your way out of the maze.

WEEK 1

Establish a Simple Filing System

Jeff Jacobs, marketing manager for Launchscore.com, a small business planning tool site with proprietary regional data that helps entrepreneur target their niche, recommends Read the rest of this entry »

The fact that sleep is an important part of a human beings health need is unquestionable. Apart from sleep being responsible for mental alertness, it also offers children the opportunity to grow. In fact, benefits of sleep are numerous. However, not everyone has sufficient sleep due to snoring problems. It has been discovered that the snoring problem has wreaked havoc in several households, with some relationships ending in divorce. This has prompted medics to work round the clock to come up with anti-snoring devices that when properly used, are able to solve this overbearing problem.

Anti-snoring devices come in several forms and shapes. Most of them are oral or nasal devices; meaning they are inserted inside the mouth or nose. There are others however that are strapped on the jaw to keep it firm when one is asleep. For the mouth pieces, they come in many forms and sizes. For better results, it is recommended that a user seeks a doctor’s advice before picking on one. When a qualified practitioner prescribes a certain device, the advantage is that they first of all find out the causes of the problem before giving a prescription. They also check out snoring mouthpiece reviews before recommending the ideal anti snoring device.

Phone, fax, and E-mail have made it easier to keep in touch, but haven’t done anything to help us communicate more effectively. If anything, there’s more confusion, especially about which methods of communication are most appropriate for different situations.

We asked experts about the best way to talk to clients, chat with coworkers, or write to customers, and all of them gave the same basic advice: Home-based workers should know their medium’s ground rules and express themselves accurately. Follow these tips and you’ll be heard and read more clearly.

E-MAIL

When to Use It E-mail is best used for conveying key information, confirming appointments, documenting decisions, or contacting a decisionmaker directly, says Nancy Flynn, a Columbus, Ohio-based consultant and author of Writing Effective E-Mail ($11; Crisp Publications Inc.).

How to Get the Most From It Choose Your Words Carefully

E-mail combines the immediacy of a phone call with the permanence of a letter, so don’t write something that might be misconstrued as sarcastic or insulting, cautions

THE VIEW FROM JIM AND MICHELE FOY’S HOME office is bucolic. Located in Highland Park, Ill., one of Chicago’s North Shore suburbs, their house is tucked well away from the street in a thick grove of trees. Baskets of bright pink fuchsia sway in the breeze just a few feet from the couple’s small conference area. And their workspace features a huge picture window overlooking a glen of bushes and ferns.

It’s a peaceful scene these days. But 19 years ago when the Foys started Dynamic Alternatives Inc., a home-based business that advises small companies on strategy, information systems, marketing, and management issues, it was no bed of fuchsia trying to share their professional space as well as their personal lives. For the first four years, the pair were office mates who couldn’t see eye to eye, literally–their desks were positioned at right angles to one another, so each stared at a different section of the wall. Here’s how they made the transition from “yours” …

Almost anything is good enough for the Web, and that lets almost anyone play with Web video. By accepting small windows for the video, the massive amount of bandwidth required for video goes away. A 160×120 video window at only 5 frames per second (fps) requires a mere 100,000 bps for video. With only a 2:1 compression, that fits comfortably into the bandwidth provided by a cable modem.

The high compression ratio of many of the current video compressors means that either the frame rate can be increased or the size of the window increased. Or sometimes both. The trick is always to create the best video, given the constraints.

CyberTainment CyberMail AV VIDEOemail

Fortunately, playing with video for the Internet has never been cheaper or easier. For around $150, CyberTainment sells Cy-berMail AV. This is a product designed to make it easy to send video e-mail to anyone on the Internet, and CyberTainment takes an interesting approach with this package.

The objectives for a specialized taxation/accounting Web site should be aligned with the business needs of the entity developing the Web site.

Flow charting Initial Web Site Design

A flowchart of the initial Web site design should be prepared to document the intended structure of the Web site. Once the Web site is placed in operation, it wall be under continuous development, as discussed later in the article, but, the initial design flowchart does show the original intentions for the information content of the Web site. The initial design flowchart for the greentaxes Web site is shown in Figure 2. A few recommendations for Web site design would include, to the extent possible, keep it simple, accentuate appearance, and use some humor if possible.

Technical Considerations

Web site technical considerations include: (1) selection of an appropriate name, (2) registration of the name with Network Solutions, Inc. or other related company, and (3) selection of an Internet host site.

For an established copy of Outlook this is simple: find the OUTLOOK.PST file that Outlook wants (right click at the top of the folder tree where it says Outlook Today, and go to Properties). Once you find that file, close Outlook and go rename the PST file to something like OUTLOOK.PSO. Now, invoke Outlook, and it will complain that it can’t find its PST file. There will be a dialog box, and you can use that to find any PST file on the network. It’s quite easy.

With a new installation of Outlook, it is not simple at all.

First, when you install Outlook, invoke it, and close it. It does not create a PST file, so there’s nothing to rename or delete. Your first move is to open Outlook, create a folder or two, move the “welcome” mail message from the Inbox to one of the folders, and exit. Now, it will have created a PST file that you can delete, and the next time

Naturally, the early adopters of this hot (or should we say cool) new technology tend to be big companies with big bucks to blow on the latest telecom software. But some small and midsize firms are also jumping on the UM bandwagon to solve internal and external communications problems and get a quantum leap on their competition.

Without going into all the geekspeak, UM basically refers to the ability to access all your messages–voice mall, e-mail, and faxes–in one place, from either a phone or a PC.

According to Ken Myer, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Active Voice, one of the leading providers of this new technology, there’s no time like the present. “People are inundated with messages, with e-mails, voice mails, and faxes. It’s wonderful we can communicate in a variety of ways. But we’re using different devices and different systems–some automated, some manual–to retrieve these messages. People want to get all the kinds of messages that come to them wherever they